Adding to the momentum of Lascasian Studies, this interdisciplinary effort of seventeen scholars offers sophisticated explorations of colonial Latin American and early modern Iberian studies.

Adding to the momentum of Lascasian Studies, this interdisciplinary effort of seventeen scholars offers sophisticated explorations of colonial Latin American and early modern Iberian studies.

A landmark in Lascasian scholarship: the work of seventeen scholars, contributions span the fields of history, Latin American studies, literary criticism, philosophy and theology.

A Spanish friar documents the brutal treatment of Caribbean natives at the hands of colonial authorities in the sixteenth century. After traveling to the New World, Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas witnessed conquistadors wreak unimaginable horrors upon the Indigenous people of the Caribbean. He later dedicated his life to fighting for their protection. Following numerous failed attempts to reason with authorities in Spain, he chose to document everything he had seen over a span of fifty years and to give it to Spain’s Prince Philip II. In A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Las Casas catalogues the atrocities he observed the Spanish colonial authorities inflict upon the native people. He discusses the brutal torture, mass genocide, and enslavement. He passionately pleas for an end to this treatment and for the native peoples to be given basic human rights.

In her thought-provoking study of Britain's relationship with Latin America and the Caribbean during the Romantic and Victorian periods, Joselyn M. Almeida makes a compelling case for extending the critical boundaries of current transatlantic and circumatlantic scholarship. She proposes the pan-Atlantic as a critical model that encompasses Britain's relationship to the non-Anglophone Americas given their shared history of conquest and the slave trade, and underscores the importance of writings by Afro-British and Afro-Hispanophone authors in formulating Atlantic culture. In adopting the term pan-Atlantic, Almeida argues for the interrelationship of the discourses of discovery, conquest, enslavement, and liberation expressed in literary motifs such as the New World, Columbus, and Las Casas; the representation of Native Americans; the enslavement and liberation of Africans; and the emancipation of Spanish America. Her study draws on the works of William Robertson, Ottobah Cugoano, Francisco Clavijero, Francisco Miranda, José Blanco White, Richard Robert Madden, Juan Manzano, Charles Darwin, and W. H. Hudson, uncovering the shared cultural grammar of travel narratives, abolitionist poems, novels, and historiographies that crosses national and linguistic boundaries.

The work of Bartolomé de Las Casas poses a number of challenges in the classroom: students need help seeing the relevance of a sixteenth-century Dominican missionary to their lives, understanding his colonial-imperial context, and negotiating the apparent contradictions among his evangelizing and his varying stances on Indian and black slavery in the New World. The essays gathered in this volume show teachers how to introduce and engage with Las Casas—one of the first voices to criticize European treatment of the native populations of the Americas and crucial today to studies of imperialism, colonialism, and human rights—in a wide range of courses, undergraduate and graduate. Like all volumes in the Approaches series, this collection includes a convenient survey of original and supplementary materials and a comprehensive array of classroom tactics. The first group of essays incorporates Las Casas into the interdisciplinary classroom, while the next group focuses on teaching the Las Casas text most widely used in literature courses: the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, a dramatic, largely firsthand view of colonial violence. The essays that follow explore the Spanish friar's letters, treatises, and petitions to the Crown; locate his connection to such broader issues as independence movements in Latin America, inter-European politics, abolition, and human rights; and suggest ways of teaching him alongside colonial figures such as Christopher Columbus and within the literary traditions of a variety of nations and languages.